Glass ceilings still firmly in place

Marla Douglas quit her job, packed her bags and moved out to Calgary last fall.

With an MBA from Saint Mary’s University, a bachelor of business administration from St. Francis Xavier University and seven years work experience, the Truro native knew she had the stuff to succeed in the boom town.

But her job search turned up surprisingly few prospects.

Despite hobnobbing in the city’s business circles and dropping off resumes for months, Douglas was only considered for entry-level positions.

“Some of the jobs required only high school or an undergrad,” she says in a recent interview. “Definitely none of them were at the level I expected after working my butt off to get an MBA.”

After three months of searching, the 30-year-old finally landed a job that matched her skill set.

But the salary was over $10,000 less than Douglas expected.

Turns out she’s not alone.

Female MBA graduates in Canada earn on average $8,167 less than their male colleagues in their first job out of school, a recent report says.

They’re also nearly 25 per cent more likely to start careers in entry-level positions, the report by Catalyst research group found, based on 1,574 students who graduated from 1996 to 2007.

The salary gap between male and female MBA graduates is not an isolated phenomenon.

Despite considerable gains in workplace equality over the years, the gender wage gap remains stubbornly persistent.

For International Women’s Day, The Chronicle Herald examined the latest statistics related to women’s economic progress. While there have been notable improvements, the slow pace of change is cause for concern, experts say.

As of 2013, women made 86 cents for every dollar earned by men based on hourly wages, Statistics Canada reports. That’s up only five cents from 1997.

When broken down by overall earnings, the pay gap is even wider with women earning 72 cents for every dollar earned by men as of 2011. That’s up only 12.6 cents over 35 years. At that rate, women in Canada won’t earn the same as men for another 75 years.

Sara Laschever says part of the reason women’s earnings are trailing behind is because they don’t like to negotiate.

“Men are more likely to negotiate than women,” says Laschever, co-author of the book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. “When women do negotiate they tend to ask for less than men,” she says. “In our research men compared negotiating to a wrestling match, while women compared it to going to the dentist.”

Yet failing to negotiate a first salary could cost women over $500,000 by age 60, she says.

“It’s partly due to the way we socialize girls and boys. Boys are taught to be tough little guys and to stick up for themselves, while girls are taught to be likable and nice.”

MBA graduate Douglas says she did try to negotiate but quickly backed off.

“I tried a couple of different tactics but I didn’t want to negotiate the heck out of it and potentially lose the opportunity,” she says. “I didn’t want to come off as too aggressive. I’m very confident in my skills but I’m less comfortable boasting about my experience and negotiating.”

But it’s not just women’s aversion to negotiating that perpetuates the gender wage gap, Patricia Bradshaw says.

The dean of the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University says there are still structural barriers limiting women’s progress in the workplace.

“There is still a glass ceiling,” she says in an interview. “It’s true women need to negotiate harder but there are more systemic issues at play. We need to look at both the individual and the society to understand what is holding women back from wage parity.

“There is an assumption held by many that the battle against sexism has been fought and that we operate in a meritocracy. It’s delusional and naive.”

Bradshaw points to the frosh week rape-chant controversy that erupted at the university last fall.

She says the incident is an opportunity to tackle “jock culture” and the systematic oppression of women.

“There are deep-seated gender stereotypes in place. We need to understand the forces of sexism before we can defeat them.”

Nonetheless, Bradshaw says there have been notable gains in workplace equality, such as more women on corporate boards, at the top of companies and on the high earners lists.

While Bradshaw says these signs of progress are encouraging, she says things aren’t changing fast enough.

Indeed, as of 2009, women held just 31.6 per cent of senior management positions, Statistics Canada reports.

Also, women made up just 11 per cent of board members on companies listed on the S&P/TSX composite index, which represents large publicly traded Canadian companies. Women’s share of all board seats is estimated to be slightly better at 14.5 per cent.

“The proportion of women in senior management positions has virtually flatlined over the past two decades, even though there has been a steady increase in overall female labour force participation,” a 2011 Conference Board of Canada report said.

“Contrary to popular belief, women have not made significant progress toward gender equality at the middle management level in either the private or public sector.”

Although the gender wage gap has been narrowing, it shrank the least in high-wage occupations like management.

Research has suggested the so-called “motherhood gap” is partly to blame for the disparity in men and women’s wages.

A TD Economics report found women who exit the workforce to have children can experience a three per cent wage penalty per year of absence.

Compounded over multiple children, the wage losses can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, the report says.

In addition, women sometimes have fewer opportunities after returning to work, a trend referred to as the mommy track.

Tanya Priske, executive director of the Centre for Women in Business at Mount Saint Vincent University, says women are being penalized for having children.

“Women shouldn’t have to trail behind their male colleagues in order to have children,” she says.

“We all know daycare is a huge issue. In Scandinavian countries with universal daycare programs we see greater equality between men and women.”

Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s gender gap study for 2013 found the Nordic countries — Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden — have the greatest gender equality.

Canada, however, is ranked No. 20 in a global measure of equality between men and women, behind Lesotho, Latvia and Nicaragua.

Closer to home, wages are closer to parity in Quebec, which has a universal daycare system, than the rest of Canada. Women’s workforce participation is also higher in Quebec.

But it’s not lack of education holding women’s wages back in Canada. Since the early 1980s, women have made up the majority of university graduates.

By 2008, 60 per cent of university undergraduates were women. Women also make up 59 per cent of college graduates.

Regardless, the wage gap among university graduates remained 16 per cent over the 1998 to 2008 period.

A 2007 study found some of that gap is because men and women tend to choose different fields of post-secondary study.

Women continue to outnumber men in education and the humanities, for example, while men gravitate toward mathematics, engineering and business degrees.

Peggy Cunningham, dean of management at Dalhousie University, says it’s disheartening that women’s educational gains aren’t fully reflected in wages. But she says without a higher education women’s wages would be worse.

“Even though there is still a wage gap, without an MBA you’re not even in that pool of high-wage earners,” Cunningham says.

A Statistics Canada study found that university graduates far out-earn those with only high school or college degrees.

Over 20 years, men with a bachelor of arts degree earned roughly $732,000 more than high-school graduates. For women, the gap was $448,000. Men with a college certificate earned $248,000 more over 20 years and women earned $180,000 more, on average.